September 5 (The Movie)

 

I was just starting my senior year in College, when the 1972 Munich Olympics were disrupted by a terrorist attack on the Israeli Olympic team, resulting eventually in nine Israeli deaths. In the aftermath of October 7, 2023, Israelis don't need any new evidence that terrorist murder is a prime weapon in the anti-Israeli arsenal. Nor should we, but perhaps it is good that we be reminded on the decades-long history of anti-Israeli terror.

September 5 is a film that chronicles the actual historic Munich massacre from the perspective of the ABC Sports crew that happened to be there, covering the Olympics. It stars Peter Sarsgard as Roone Arledge (ABC Sports President), John Magaro as Geoffrey Mason, (head of the control room in Munich), and Leonie Benesch as Marianne Gebhardt (a German staffer, the only one in the room who understood German). There is also some archival footage from the actual event, including Jim McKay and Peter Jennings.

The film fully captures the tragedy of the event, even while its focus is primarily not in the Olympic Village but in the ABC Sports broadcasting facility. It takes us back to a seemingly long lost world of rotary phones and highlights the inherent tensions of covering such an event live in real time, including on-the-spot quick decisions and errors. It also illustrates the impact of commercial rivalry with other news networks and even with other divisions within the same network.

The film stays focused on the crew and what they go through. We get glimpses of the larger picture - of, for example, the tensions about continuing the Olympics while all this was going on, and of the historical anxieties felt in a special way by the German hosts of the Olympics. But, despite being set in such a seemingly different media world (now more than half a century ago), the film's contemporary resonance remains relevant and vivid.

Biden in the Sunset

 

There is a saying about "the best laid plans." President Joe Biden had planned to make a final visit to Rome this week, which would have included a final presidential audience with the Pope, but - dutiful to the end - the President is remaining in the U.S. because of the fires in California. White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said that the President has canceled his trip “to remain focused on directing the full federal response in the days ahead.”

Our second Catholic president (unlike the first one) has never been shy about his faith and has highlighted his Catholicism continuously. In 10 days, he will yield his place as the most prominent U.S. Catholic to Vice President-elect J.D. Vance, a convert whose style of Catholicism may appear somewhat different from Biden's. At least until he leaves the White House, however, Biden has consistently keep his religious commitments at the center of public perception of him.

Biden ("Scranton Joe") represents a particular style of American Catholicism, rooted in the ethnic Church's 20th-century heyday in the northeast. His is a "liberal" style of Catholicism, that talks about "social justice" and sings On Eagle's Wings (which he couldn't resist quoting even in his otherwise excellent eulogy for Jimmy Carter). Biden's style of Catholicism has much to commend it even if, like the President himself, it may appear in some ways to be fading from the American scene. 

U.S. Catholicism is increasingly a broad religious identity comprised of many coexisting, sometimes overlapping, and sometimes competing subcultures. In that mix, Joe Biden may well represent some of the best of 1970s "social justice' On Eagle's Wings Catholicism. When he praised Jimmy Carter's deep Christian faith in his eulogy at the National Cathedral, Biden was unabashedly expressing his own lifelong religious commitments. Describing Carter as "driven and devoted to making real the words of his Savior" and "a good and faithful servant of God," Biden was surely also surely expressing his own aspirations to put his own deep Catholic faith into practice through a political vocation. His is not the only possible style of American Catholicism, and his may not be the only effective way to live out a Catholic political vocation, but it is surely one very fruitful way.

Indeed, as Pope Francis recently wrote in his encyclical letter promoting devotion to the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus, "our work as Christians for the betterment of society should not obscure its religious inspiration, for that, in the end, would be to seek less for our brothers and sisters than what God desires to give them" (Dilexit Nos, 205)

Photo: President Biden, Vice President Harris, and former Presidents Clinton, Bush, Obama, and Trump at the State Funeral for Jimmy Carter, Chip Somodevilla/Getty

Memorializing Jimmy Carter

 

This week, the nation is formally memorializing its 39th President, Jimmy Carter (1924-2024), with the now familiar rituals of a formal public state funeral in the nation's capital.

Jimmy Carter lived 100 years, during which he was a naval officer, a peanut farmer, a state Governor, a lifelong Sunday School teacher, and a Nobel-prize winning humanitarian. He was President of the United States for four of those years, from 1977 to 1981. As a southern politician and Georgia's Governor from 1971 to 1975, Carter successfully navigated the Democratic party's traumatic transition from the party of segregation to the party of civil rights. However, he was a one-term president, and one-term presidents are usually not well remembered by American history. His term was effectively a brief Democratic interlude in the long period of Republican domination of the White House that began with Richard Nixon's election in 1968 and ceased (temporarily) with Bill Clinton's election in 1992. The 1976 election was, of course, the post-Watergate election and the Democrats' win was very much a popular reaction against the Republicans because of Watergate (and President Ford's pardon of former President Nixon).

So Carter's presidency was a bit of an outlier from the start. As importantly, if not more so, Carter himself was an outlier, a self-professed "outsider." Americans do seem to like electing outsiders (e.g., Obama, Trump). Unfortunately, at least in normal times, governing is about relationships and expertise. In other words, it is an insider activity. And that, as much as anything else, may help explain why Carter's presidency seemed so unsuccessful in its time.

With the famous exception of the Camp David Peace Treaty between Egypt and Israel, which was clearly Carter's great personal accomplishment as president, Carter's tenure in the White House was largely perceived as a failure. There was inflation (worse than the inflation that supposed helped defeat Kamala Harris this past year). There as an energy crisis with long lines at gas stations. There was the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the American boycott of the 1980 Olympics. And, worst of all, there was the Iranian hostage crisis, widely perceived as an extreme example of foreign-policy failure. All this proved Carter's undoing. I vividly remember Ronald Reagan's campaign line on the troubled economy, which ended something like, "Recovery will be when Mr. Carter is out of a job."

In a sense, Carter's presidency was a transitional presidency - a transition from the post New Deal, post-war liberal consensus, in which Republicans Richard Nixon (and to a lesser extent Gerald Ford) fully shared, a transition from that post New Deal, post-war liberal consensus to Reaganite "conservatism," a transition from an ever more tentative evolution toward democracy to an increasingly obvious oligarchy.

That said, as has already been pointed out by others, the disastrous ideological turn associated with the Reagan victory in 1980 was already getting its start in the Carter years. It was Carter, after all, who started "deregulation." 

Part of being an "outsider" was being less politically connected with the traditional New Deal coalition, centered on organized labor. This contributed to a degree of liberal disillusionment with Carter during his presidency, which led to Senator Edward Kennedy's extremely unsuccessful 1980 primary challenge. As often happens when incumbent presidents are challenged by dissidents within their own party, Kennedy's challenge weakened Carter and the Democrats in the campaign against Reagan. 

Carter left the White House on January 20, 1981, and began his almost 44 years of post-presidency. It now seems expected of ex-presidents that they will settle somewhere other than where they originally came from, play golf, and make lots of money. Jimmy Carter, in contrast, returned home to Plains, GA, where he started the Carter Center, and devoted the rest of his long life to doing good around the world - working to eradicate diseases and promote human rights. A devout Baptist Sunday School teacher, he exemplified putting faith into action - an admirable alternative to playing golf and making money.

Photo: Vice President Harris and husband honor President Jimmy Carter lying-in-state, U.S. Capito, January 7, 2025. Jack Gruber, USA TODAY.

Counting the Votes

What a difference four years makes! As required by the constitution and on the date prescribed in the law, the Congress met in joint session early this afternoon, with Kamala Harris presiding in her role as President of the Senate, to count the electoral votes for President and Vice President. Like Richard Nixon in 1961 and Al Gore in 2001, it fell to her to announce her own defeat, adding a personal poignancy to what has in the past typically been an essential but simple and straightforwardly uncontentious political ritual.

Last tine, of course, it was anything but simple and straightforward as various Republican members unjustifiably challenged the electoral vote, while an insurrectionary  MAGA mob stormed the Capitol in an effort to prevent the government from transacting its business and undo the peaceful process of constitutional democracy. Perhaps because so many members felt personally endangered, there was a brief bipartisan moment recognizing the wrongness of all this. But that moment as far too brief. Four years later, the election-denying party is set to return to power, in part because constitutional democratic government mattered less to the electorate than the proverbial price of eggs.

This time the only inconvenience in carrying out the constitutionally mandated counting of the votes was the snow, which covered Washington in winter beauty - a naturally induced dramatic contrast to the human and political ugliness on display there four years ago. What turned into an ugly and dangerous 15-hour drama four years ago was all peacefully over and done with in about a half an hour. Of course, there were no surprises as the four tellers took turns reading the vote tallies of each of the 50 states and the District of Columbia. Donald Trump and J.D. Vance each received 312 votes. Kamala Harris and Tim Walz each received 226 votes.

The Republicans couldn't resist interrupting the announcement of the vote, jumping up to applaud when Harris announced Trump's tally. So, of course, the Democrats had to do the same when she announced her votes, thus highlighting the country's progressive descent into tribalism. That said, the votes have now been counted. We now have a President-elect and a Vice President-elect. The peaceful passage of political power from one party to another has been properly proclaimed and will duly take place in two weeks. All is as it is supposed to be in a constitutional democracy.

But, of course, that is only because those who lost are believers in constitutional democracy  and practiced what they preach. Had the election gone the other way, we might well have seen significant efforts to contest the result. Our national commitment to constitutional democracy has been upheld and maintained, but its broad endorsement and depth of support among the electorate have been sorely tested.

Photo: Vice President Kamala Harris, President of the Senate, and House Speaker Mike Johnson preside at joint session of Congress to count the electoral votes. Photograph: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Congestion Pricing Comes to Manhattan

 

Sunday, January 5, 2025, it finally happened - almost miraculously, given all the opposition. Today, congestion pricing went into effect in Manhattan below 60th Street, as New York at last caught up with London and other foreign cities in requiring cars to pay for some small share of the damage they cause the environment and the social life of urban spaces. That was, in fact, (according to one eyewitness) written on one of the signs held by some who, despite the cold,  turned out to celebrate the event, "THANK YOU FOR PAYING A TINY SHARE OF THE DAMAGE YOUR CAR CAUSES" (see Christopher Bonanos, "It's On" New York Magazine).

From now on - at least until reactionary forces succeed in rolling it back - most cars coming into the designated congestion-pricing zone (Manhattan below 60th Street) will pay a toll (as much as $9.00). For months, cameras have been set up at the 60th Street boundary point (photo), waiting to be turned on, to monitor the traffic - and bill cars for the privilege of using and abusing New York's streets and neighborhoods.

It is but a small victory in the larger war of returning the city and its streets and neighborhoods to their rightful owners - the people. How many drivers will actually change their behavior in response to this financial disincentive remains to be seen. And, as always, there may be unintended and unforeseen consequences. Meanwhile, the incoming President is unsurprisingly opposed to the program. So efforts to undo congestion pricing will likely continue. And like so much of human progress, it may well be rolled back. But, for now at least, cars are at last being charged for at least some of the damage one of the 20th-century's most destructive inventions has so long been imposing on our society with such impunity.

Photo: Entering the congestion-pricing zone at 60th Street and Columbus Avenue.